The Domain Name System (DNS) is a naming system designed to translate domain names meaningful to humans into numerical identifiers that may be used by networking equipment to locate resources on the internet. A user typically directs a web browser to access a resource (e.g., a web page) by providing a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to the browser that contains a domain name. In order to access the resource, the browser needs to translate the domain name into an internet protocol (IP) address using a DNS service. For example, a web page may be associated with a URL “http://www.news.com/US/” which contains the domain name of the web page “www.news.com.” In order to locate and access the web page, the browser must request from a DNS service a translation of the domain name of the web page “www.news.com” to an IP address (e.g., 74.125.224.135).
Even after a web page is retrieved, the browser may need to translate domain names in the web page content itself. For example, the web page content may contain content elements (e.g., images, advertisements, dynamic content, web page elements, etc.) that may need to be downloaded from various content domain names (e.g., images.news.com, money.news.com, www.ads.com, etc.). In order to correctly display the web page “http://www.news.com/US/,” the various content domain names also need to be translated into IP addresses by sending DNS requests to a DNS service (e.g., a DNS server or a local DNS service).
However, translating the content domain names into IP addresses only after they have been identified in the content of the web page may take a considerable amount of time.